Introduction
Leadership is widely recognized as an essential driver of organizational performance and improvement, but little is known about its role in improving the quality of early care and education (ECE) settings, or outcomes for staff and children. Additionally, information on how to measure the key constructs associated with leadership and the activities that demonstrate leadership is lacking. The Early Care and Education Leadership Study (ExCELS) focuses on leadership within an ECE center-based setting, at the building or center level. The ExCELS project approaches leadership as a construct that defines the range of people who participate in leadership in ECE centers—who leaders are—as well as what they bring to leadership, and what they do as leaders. Leadership, defined in this way, is broader than one leader, even while a strong center leader can be an essential ingredient to effective leadership.
The goals of the ExCELS project are to: (1) fill the definitional and measurement gaps to understand what leadership looks like as defined by who participates in leadership in center-based ECE settings and the ways in which leaders can improve quality experiences for children in ECE settings, (2) develop a measure of ECE leadership, and (3) identify actionable leadership quality improvement initiatives and methods of evaluating them. The initial work of ExCELS focused on two foundational products that will guide the rest of the work: a literature review to inform a theory of change of ECE leadership for quality improvement, and this compendium of existing measures. The information from these products will inform the design of a descriptive study to develop and test a new measure of ECE leadership.
Topics
We document the following topics for 24 measures that focus on aspects of leadership that are relevant to ECE center-based settings. The measures come from the ECE, K-12 education, management, and health fields.
• Purpose, context, and content measured
• Administration characteristics and technical information
• Availability and developer and/or publisher contacts
Purpose
The purpose of the ExCELS compendium is to describe measures of leadership relevant to ECE settings. Further, the compendium identifies what information exists and what information is needed to better understand leadership and its influence in ECE settings. For the ExCELS project, the compendium will inform the development and testing of a new measure of ECE leadership. More broadly, the compendium will provide the ECE field —including researchers, program evaluators, and leadership program or quality initiative developers—with an overview of how various related disciplines are conceptualizing and measuring leadership in ways relevant to ECE.
Key Findings and Highlights
Based on the 24 measures profiled in the compendium, we have an initial picture of the landscape of leadership measurement.
- Measures tap aspects of leadership from the perspective of a particular field, generally management or ECE
- Content commonly taps aspects of what leaders do (the practices they engage in and promote)
- Leadership structure of who participates to decision-making—who leaders are—is captured less commonly in measures
- Primary purpose of all measures is research and evaluation
- Measures often aggregate staff reports about leaders to produce site-level scores
- Measures demonstrate acceptable reliability
- Validity information that demonstrates the measure captures what it intends to is generally available
Methods
The compendium involved:
- Identifying potential measures and screening them based on a set of criteria (construct found in core of ExCELS theory of change, published in the past 25 years, technical documentation available on reliability and validity, and developed or tested in the United States)
- Review of the measure source documentation as of summer 2019
Implications for Next Steps
Based on this compendium, the landscape of existing measures of leadership demonstrates breadth in the content areas available. However, the depth of and connection between content areas is still incomplete. We propose five considerations for future directions for ECE leadership measurement.
- Increase measurement of who leaders are—the leadership structure within a center of who participates in decision making
- Expand the depth of information about what leaders do
- Distinguish what center leaders and teacher leaders do
- Differentiate the constructs of who leaders are and what they bring and do within a single measure
- Connect who leaders are and what they do to relational coordination processes and distributed leadership approaches
Citation
L. Malone, S. Albanese, C. Jones, Y. Xue, G. Kirby, and A. Douglass. (2021). Compendium of Existing Measures for Understanding Leadership in Early Care and Education. OPRE Report 2021-220. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Glossary
- ECE:
- Early care and education
- Center leader(s):
- Can be one or more persons who hold formal responsibility for overseeing administrative, operational, and instructional activities within an ECE center.
- Distributed leadership:
- Leadership that recognizes behaviors or actions rather than job title or formal position alone, and that involves the primary center leader along with a range of staff—including teaching staff—in learning, decision-making, and planning and implementing change for improvement.
- Leader:
- Who participates in leadership by contributing to decision-making and influencing change and quality improvement; leadership can include center leaders and teacher leaders.
- Leadership:
- the combination of center and teacher leaders that exist within an ECE center
- Relational coordination:
- Shared goals, shared knowledge, mutual respect, and high-quality communication among center leaders, teacher leaders, other center staff, and families.
- Teacher leader(s):
- Teaching staff (lead, head, or co-teachers and assistant teachers) who carry responsibilities in the classroom and hold formal responsibilities to supervise and support other teaching staff or informally contribute to decision making and improvement